Davenport fast-forwarded to a few minutes in and Aloa watched as Hamlin paced the stage, telling a story about nearly starving after a bear destroyed his food cache while he was living in backcountry Alaska writing Eternal Light, the poetry book that had given him a degree of success.
Davenport fast-forwarded the video again. “OK. Watch what happens when this guy in the audience asks him why he didn’t just call for a supply plane. The guy says he used to live in Alaska. It’s a valid point.”
Aloa watched Hamlin say “good question” and explain how bad weather had interfered with his satellite phone and his nearest neighbor was ten miles away over rough terrain. Davenport stopped the video and rewound it a few seconds. “OK, now watch Hamlin’s face when he says ‘good question.’ See how his lips are tight? That’s a microexpression, a brief but intense flash of emotion. He’s angry at the question, which is a sign he’s probably lying about almost starving. Most of us don’t realize our faces and bodies are telling the world things we don’t want it to know.
“Now watch this.” Davenport fast-forwarded the video to a spot where a woman asked Hamlin how he dealt with criticism, like the critic who said reading his book was like being bitten by a thousand mosquitoes while a bear chewed his head.
“See how he touches his throat just before he answers?” Davenport asked. “That’s violence there. He wants to strangle her for bringing up something that puts him in a bad light. He’s got some real issues with self-esteem and with women, I think.”
“Can you really rely on facial expressions and body tics for such important clues?” Aloa asked.
“If you’re trained in it, then yes. One time, I interviewed this programmer who kept insisting he had no connection with a hacker group called Sandsnake and when I asked about one of its members, a guy called AnthillPhil, he said he’d never heard of the guy. But in the middle of his denial, he touched the side of his nose. His subconscious was saying his story stunk and I knew I had him. Eventually, we linked the guy to Sandsnake. Real interrogation is about seeing details.”
Aloa thought of the skeleton fingers that marked Corrine Davenport’s lower belly.
“Speaking of details, your wife had an interesting tattoo. Did it mean anything?”
“You’re good,” Davenport said. “You could have been an agent.”
“Thanks, but I don’t do well with bureaucracies,” Aloa said.
“Neither do I,” he said. “But to answer your question, the tattoo was based on customs in the old houses of pleasure in Japan. If a courtesan and customer fell in love, and if the customer couldn’t buy the courtesan’s contract and free her, they would give each other tokens of their undying love. They would write pledges of loyalty, cut off a lock of hair, get a tattoo, pull out a fingernail, or cut off a finger. Corrine’s tattoo was the symbolic version of cutting off a finger. She wanted to show me her eternal love and loyalty. I was against it. I told her I would probably die long before she did and that she should remarry.”
“She got it after your accident?”
“She did.”
A discreet knock came and Kyle stuck his head inside the room. “Sorry to interrupt, Christian, but your lawyer is on the phone. He says he finally got a settlement offer from the garbage company and that it’s good news, but he wants to run it by you before he goes any further.”
Davenport pressed his lips together. “I guess I need to take the call.”
“It’s important,” Kyle said.
“Kyle, will you show Aloa out? And give her the stuff we found.” He nodded at Aloa. “I think you’ll find it interesting.”
At the front door, Kyle put a manila envelope into her hands. “Be careful with him,” he said in a low voice. “Christian’s not as strong as he pretends to be.”
Back home, Aloa heated up a can of tomato soup, noticed the amount of salt on the label, and calculated how much water weight she’d gain. She almost dumped it down the sink, except she knew that’s exactly what her disease wanted. Screw you, she told her illness and added a pat of butter to the soup, although she fished it out a few seconds later and set it aside.
She washed up the few dishes she’d used and retired to her desk. The manila envelope Davenport had given her sat unopened. She shook out its contents. The first set of papers turned out to be a printout of the texts between Hamlin and Davenport’s wife.
Aloa had skimmed the texts at Quinn’s office, but now she read each one more carefully.
From Burns: When will U get here? I’m waiting.
Corrine: Sooner than soon. I can still feel UR touch.
Burns: I would be with U all night if I could.
A few weeks later, from Corrine: I’ve laid out my heart for you. Be gentle.
A plea for understanding, Aloa thought.
Burns: Your heart is safe with me, sweet one.
Four months later, again from Corrine: I can’t meet. C has a fever.
Burns: Can’t Kyle take care of him?
Corrine: I sent the little prick home.
Corrine, later: I know what you’re doing.
Burns: I’ll see you. In class.
Aloa wasn’t sure whether to believe Hamlin’s or Corrine’s version of the relationship. It was clear, however, the affair had unraveled—and also that Corrine had disliked Kyle. Was there something there?
She turned to the last page and saw a final text from Corrine, which was sent the morning of the day she died. The gray sea and the long black land. Shall we?
There was no reply.
She stared at the text for a few minutes and turned to her laptop, typing in the words and wondering if the police had done the same. The sentence was a quote from the poem “Meeting at Night” by Robert Browning. It was about a suitor who traveled across land and sea to rendezvous with his secret lover one night.
An invitation for Hamlin to meet her?
If so, the guilt meter had just swung strongly in the professor’s direction.
She pressed her lips together and sketched out a quick timeline of the affair based on the texts, made a note in her Moleskine about Corrine’s dislike of Kyle, and added the Browning quote to the list of questions she had for Hamlin.
She turned to the next document: a full transcription of the interview with the Davenports’ neighbor, who said the late-night caller had knocked once and that the door had opened quickly. Almost as if whoever was in the Davenports’ house had been expecting the visitor, the neighbor said. She didn’t see the caller leave (her cat had chosen that moment to throw up on the rug) but she described the visitor as about six feet in height and medium build, wearing a black hoodie pulled over his head, blue jeans, and dark canvas shoes.
A description that could fit Hamlin—and thousands of other males in the city.
The caller also was white (the neighbor saw his hand when he knocked on the door), and if the caller had arrived by car, he hadn’t parked it on their street, she said. The rest of the interview was about how sorry she felt for poor Mr. Davenport and how it wasn’t safe to live anywhere these days.
Aloa set the report aside and wondered how Davenport had gotten the documents. She guessed he still had connections in the FBI, people who would want to help him, but it was unusual for a local jurisdiction to provide reports to the bureau unless the FBI was asked to get involved in the case. She made a note to dig further.
The next sheet of paper made her set down her pen. The police had gotten a warrant for Hamlin’s cell phone locations for the three days surrounding Corrine Davenport’s death. While the locations were only general, they cast another dark shadow on Hamlin’s claims of innocence. According to the report, Hamlin had been in Corrine’s neighborhood on the night she died.
The news about Hamlin sent Aloa back to her bedroom, where she yanked on her running clothes, pulled on the pink watch cap and an old sweatshirt, and strode out the front door. She headed to the Embarcadero, where she let her frustration with Hamlin’s arrogance and lack of transparency diss
olve with a series of wind sprints. The last text from Corrine and the cell phone records didn’t prove he was the killer, but it certainly gave her doubts about his innocence. Patience, she told herself.
Forty-five minutes later, finally calm, she headed for home, slipping into her favorite market for a loaf of bread, a couple of avocados, and two fat oranges. She stopped in front of a cluttered hardware store with a display of space heaters in the window and went inside, using her phone to buy one of the electric warmers. If she had to fight her way through this case, at least she would do it at a pleasant temperature.
Back home, she set up the heater by her desk, put away the groceries, and stood in the shower until she thawed out. Half an hour later, she was pushing her way through the front door of Justus.
The place was noisy with people escaping the cold and gray.
In one corner, a tired-looking man in his early forties sat nursing a beer, a skinny, one-eyed cat curled on his lap. Baxter, the stray Gully had adopted after it had been tossed out of a car at six weeks of age, had a way of locating those most in need of comfort and giving them the gift of his soothing purrs. As she closed the door behind her, Aloa wondered about the tired man’s story.
Across the room, the Brain Farm, armed with glasses of house red, were hunched over a table, stabbing fingers at a scattering of papers and books. When Doc looked up and saw her, the whole crew began shoving everything onto their laps and into worn satchels.
What the hell were they up to?
Aloa waded through the crowd to the bar, catching Erik’s eye.
She looked up at the chalkboard menu. “A glass of red and whatever Singapore crab pasta is,” she called as Erik hustled whiskeys and beer.
“You won’t be sorry,” he said, turning to shout her order through the pass-through window into the kitchen.
Guillermo popped suddenly into view. “You have survived the cat’s foot,” he cried.
Aloa frowned.
“I was reading Carl Sandburg to him this morning,” Erik explained, “his poem about fog.” Then to Gully: “It’s ‘little cat feet,’ my love.”
“Pues,” said Gully, “the kitten did her no harm.” He gave Aloa one of his beautiful smiles. “I hope you will like today’s special. It is a crab that has its claws in both Italy and Asia.” And with that, he disappeared.
“How can you not love that man?” Erik said as he poured Aloa a glass of pinot noir and two men at the end of the bar shouted orders for Irish coffees.
“He’s pretty great,” Aloa agreed.
She took her wine and pushed her way over to the Brain Farm. “What were you guys looking at when I came in?” she asked.
“Nothing,” P-Mac said. “Just planning a little jaunt. A getaway.”
Doc elbowed him in the ribs.
“So what’s new with the case, Ink?” Tick asked hurriedly, throwing a glare in P-Mac’s direction.
“Well, I had a chance to take a long look at the texts between your son and the victim,” Aloa said.
“And?” Tick asked.
“And they don’t prove what happened one way or the other.”
She gave them a brief rundown.
“Then Burns could be telling the truth,” Tick said.
“He could be,” Aloa said slowly. “There’s one big problem for him, though.”
The Brain Farm leaned in.
“The cops are pretty sure he was in the area on the night of the murder.”
Doc snapped his fingers. “Those bastards got his cell phone records.”
“I didn’t say that,” Aloa started, but the gray-hairs were already in full outrage mode.
“Privacy means nothing to Uncle Satan,” P-Mac cried. “I’m telling you, it’s time to make our move, Tick.”
“I agree,” Doc said.
“What move?” Aloa asked.
“It’s time to get the kid out of here,” P-Mac said and pulled a stack of papers from his lap, on top of which lay a half-open map of Mexico.
“Oh, no, no,” Aloa said.
“Why not?” Tick said. “You’re a fool if you rely on the justice system. Just look at all the innocent people rotting in jail. We’re no different than some Third World dictatorship. We pretend we have rules, but it’s all about money and power. I say it’s better to get the hell out of Dodge.”
“Yeah,” Doc agreed. “Look at the Central Park Five. Five kids, all of color, coerced to confess to the rape of a white woman—a rape, it turned out later, some other guy committed.”
The men nodded vigorously.
“The cops will take running away as a sign of guilt,” Aloa said.
“It’s not against the law to take a vacation,” P-Mac said.
“Lots of people go to Puerto Vallarta this time of year,” Tick said in a voice that was anything but innocent.
“Who says he’ll even go with you?” Aloa asked.
“We’ll tell him about the cell phone records,” Tick said.
Aloa groaned. “Listen. Before you do anything, I have an idea. Something that might help show he wasn’t the guy who knocked on the door the night the wife was killed.” The thought had come to Aloa when she’d seen the tired man with the cat on his lap.
“What is it?” the men demanded.
“I need to look into it first,” she said.
Now it was the men’s turn to groan.
“I also want to check out the cases the wife prosecuted. Davenport said she did low-level stuff, but that doesn’t rule out that somebody was crazy or angry enough to want revenge. It’s way too early to be pulling a Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid.”
“Bolivia,” said Tick. “Now there’s an idea.”
“Please, Tick,” Aloa said and put her hand over his. “Before you go running off somewhere, let me see what I can find. Let me do what I do. You know nothing’s simple, and if the cops were going to arrest Burns just because he was in the area when Corrine died, they would have done it already. You have to trust me.”
His faded blue eyes searched Aloa’s face.
“You got some ideas?” he asked.
“I do.”
He took a slug of wine. “All right,” he said.
“That’s my guy,” said Aloa and leaned over and kissed his rough cheek.
“One Singapore crab pasta,” Erik interrupted, setting a steaming plate of handmade pasta topped with arugula and fresh crab in chili sauce in front of Aloa. Her brain automatically cataloged the calories—1,500 for the entire plate, 500 if she only ate part of it—and she shoved the thought away.
“Everything good here?” Erik asked, seeing the serious faces and the map on the table.
P-Mac flipped the map facedown. “Just doing some vacation planning.”
Aloa looked hard at the men. “But then you decided not to go, didn’t you?”
Only Doc nodded.
DAY 5
Aloa piloted her motorcycle toward Burns Hamlin’s house, her eyes and brain on high alert. Thick fog pushed against the ground, wrapping around buildings and making pedestrians on the sidewalk look like apparitions. Halfway there, a delivery truck pulled out from a side street in front of her. She swerved, missing the truck’s bumper by inches. It took a few minutes for her heart to stop pounding.
This morning’s headlines had chronicled four more deaths from the fog. A produce truck had crashed into a car on the Golden Gate Bridge, claiming another life, and a pair of asthmatics without health insurance had come to the hospital too late to be saved. The body of a frail seventy-two-year-old Vietnam vet had been found on Ocean Beach, dead of exposure.
Aloa had read the article over a cup of coffee. It described how the vet, then a twenty-two-year-old in the special forces, had survived firefights and ambushes only to have accidentally been shot in the head by a fellow soldier. He’d come home suffering from severe headaches and bouts of paranoia and, after a few years, had ended up on the streets.
He died huddled near a driftwood log, dressed only in a T-shirt and a
pair of ragged camouflage pants.
A casualty of war that would never be counted, Aloa thought.
Muggings in the city also had spiked, the perpetrators disappearing into the murk before their victims could get a good look at them. It was as if the world had been wrapped in some horror-movie version of cotton candy: gray, thickly spun, and deadly.
She parked the motorcycle near Hamlin’s house, took off her helmet, and ran her fingers through her hair. The ride here had been gnarly, but the real hard work lay ahead: talking her way back into Burns Hamlin’s house.
She’d checked his course schedule last night and planned her arrival so that if he wouldn’t open his door, she could at least nab him an hour later when he had to leave for class. Her pitch to him would have to be quick.
She knocked, pulled up the collar of her leather jacket against the chill, and waited.
“I don’t want to talk to you,” came Hamlin’s voice from the other side of the door.
“I’m sure you don’t, but you might be interested in this.”
“What?” Hamlin demanded.
“I ran into Esther Sterling the other day and she said she’s looking for a new poetry collection. Sea-based poems,” Aloa called through the door. Esther Sterling was a celebrated UC Berkeley professor and novelist who’d married a multimillionaire and started her own indie publishing house. Aloa had taken Esther’s class her senior year and been befriended by the silver-haired teacher, who’d recognized her own eating issues in her student. They met for coffee a couple of times a year to talk about what was going on in their lives and, at their last gathering a few weeks earlier, Esther had mentioned her plans. Aloa was pretty sure her professor wouldn’t mind having her name used in the pursuit of justice. Besides, Hamlin wasn’t a bad poet.
The door cracked open. “You know Esther Sterling?”
“We’re friends.”
“My agent has been trying to get hold of her for months.”
The door swung open wider.
“I could give her your name,” Aloa said. Then, quickly, “I also read the witness statement from the neighbor who saw someone at the Davenports’ front door that night, and I think there’s a way to clear you.”
The Thin Edge Page 6